Where is linda ronstadt these days

Today's Top Stories. Makeover Takeover: Colonial Comeback. Treat Your Family to Homemade Cupcakes. Linda in the 80s. Paul Natkin. Richard McCaffrey. The Washington Post. Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits. And a lot of gender-crossing. It looked like I was seeing the future. I can hear the song. I can hear what I would be doing with it. I can hear the accompaniment.

I listen to Mexican radio—the local Banda station out of San Jose. I mostly listen to NPR. There are some good modern people. I like Sia. How do you cope with the frustration of not being able to do everything you want to do? I just have to stay home a lot.

The main attraction in San Francisco is the opera and the symphony, and I make an effort and go out, but I can only do it a few times a year. You broke onto the scene with such a powerhouse voice. What did it feel like, singing with that voice? Well, I was trying to figure out how to sing! And trying to be heard over the electric instruments. I had no idea that I sang as loud as I did. In the documentary, you talk about growing up in Tucson, Arizona, and how culturally rich that was. How do the current politics around the border resonate with you?

I feel filled with impotent rage. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, and the Sonoran Desert is on both sides of the border. The same food, the same clothes, the same traditional life of ranching and farming.

It used to be that you could go across the border and have lunch and visit friends and shop in the little shops there. There was a beautiful department store in the fifties and sixties. My parents had friends on both sides of the border.

They were friends with the ranchers, and we went to all their parties and their baptisms and their weddings and their balls. Animals are getting trapped in there.

Children are getting cut on it. In the meantime, you see people serenely skateboarding and girls with their rollerskates, kids playing in the park. I spent time out in the desert when I was still healthy, working with a group of Samaritans who go to find people that are lost. You run into the Minute Men or the Border Patrol every five seconds.

The border is fully militarized. People are coming to work. You have to be pretty desperate to want to cross that desert. You were talking about this back in , when your memoir came out, before it became such a national wedge issue. Were people not paying enough attention before?

I lived at the border then. I lived in Tucson for ten years. I saw what was going on. That was going on in the Bush Administration. So people have been caught in this web of suffering, dying in the desert. My children were coming home repeating homophobic remarks they heard at school. So I moved back to San Francisco. I wanted them to have a sense of what a community was like where you could walk to school, walk to the market.

More of an urban-village experience. In Tucson, I was driving in the car for forty-five minutes to get them to school and then forty-five minutes to get them back, in a hot car. I can tell that you have a real sense of mourning over what the border used to be. And they all influence our culture profoundly.

The cowboy suit that Roy Rogers would wear, with the yoke shirt and the pearl buttons and the bell-bottom frontier pants and the cowboy hat—those are all Mexican. We imported it. We eat burritos and tacos, and our music is influenced a lot by Mexican music. It goes back and forth across the border all the time. How did growing up in that hybrid Mexican-American culture shape you as a musician? I listened to a lot of Mexican music on the radio, and my dad had a really great collection of traditional Mexican music.

I loved popular folk music like Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved the real traditional stuff, like the Carter family. I loved Bob Dylan. And I tried to copy what I could. When I heard the Byrds doing folk rock, I thought that was what I wanted to do. It was a song I found on a Greenbriar Boys record, and I thought it was a strong piece of material. I just liked the song. But the record company recognized that the song was strong, too, so they had me come back and record it with their musicians and their arrangement.

And I was pretty shocked. But it turned out to be a hit. We were on our way to a meeting at Capitol Records, in an old Dodge or something, and I was jammed in the back with our guitars. Then the engine froze, and the car made this horrible metal-on-metal shriek. We had to push it to the nearest gas station, half a block away.

Nobody was anything particular at the time. We were all aspiring musicians. The Dillards were there. The Byrds hung out there. And then it started to be people like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. Carole King would play there. When Joni Mitchell played, she played two weeks.

I think I saw every single night. Ronstadt performed her last concert in Two years later, the same year she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Latin Recording Academy pictured , Ronstadt formally announced her retirement. In , Ronstadt revealed that she could no longer sing because of Parkinson's disease.

And I was made most aware of it by having it banished. I can still sing in my mind, but I can't do it physically. Former President Barack Obama likely spoke for many when he admitted to Ronstadt during the National Medal of Arts ceremony that he had a crush on her "back in the day.

While she sometimes still appears in the spotlight -- as she did earlier this year, when she and Emmylou Harris left presented Dolly Parton with the MusiCares Person of the Year award -- she mostly sticks close to home, she told the Times. It's going to get worse every day," Ronstadt said of her diagnosis.

Sometimes I fall down. But that's the new normal. I just have to accept it. I had a long turn at the trough. The biggest challenge that comes with the brain disorder is losing autonomy as motor control diminishes, she explained. Brushing your teeth, taking a shower," Ronstadt told Cooper. Individuals with this movement disorder have difficulty maintaining balance and controlling speech, eye movement and mood, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

They also often experience frequent falls due to the progressive loss of mobility. I'm like a toddler," Ronstadt said. I've had to relearn how to eat. You could carve a new brain map if you're patient and willing to do that, but it's hard. She's also had to learn how to exist in the world without her singing voice -- and in more ways than one.

Her singing, she told Cooper, offered bonding experiences with her family members, even those whose political views she doesn't share. Linda Ronstadt's delicious takedown of Mike Pompeo. But singing out loud demands a lot of repetitive motion, and for someone with a movement disorder "it's just impossible," Ronstadt said. Now when she sees her family, "I have to be careful," she explained with a smile. I try to just hum a little harmony some place in the corner.

With more than a dozen platinum or multiplatinum albums, 10 Grammy awards and a career that spans from the s to the s, Ronstadt is recognized as one of the best-selling American pop, rock and country artists in history.

Her everlasting presence in American music and culture remains timeless, and the iconic artist was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony.